When a user in a communication network wishes to communicate with a second user, then the user sends a request to the second user through the network. For any reason, when the second user is not able to reply to the request and communicate with the user, then the network plays a failure announcement to the user. The failure announcement would indicate the reason for the failure in establishing a communication session with the second user. For example, if the second user is busy and does not reply to the request, then an announcement like “Called user is busy” may be played to the user.
The failure announcements convey the reason for the failure in establishing a communication session and are thus useful means for conveying the reason for the failure. However, in some cases the user may be charged for the announcement being played and the user has to pay usage charges although a communication session was not established with the second user. Also, due to the failure announcement being played from the network of the second user or from an intermediate exchange, the network would not be able to allow the user to reconnect the communication session to a different number or to a third user. In systems, such as Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) systems, the failure announcement may be suppressed from being played to the user. But in Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) systems, there is no Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) interface to suppress failure announcements from being played.